Tuesday, March 5, 2013

The RHQ Net Services plugin has just been updated with new features. It now defines three types of services:

HTTP service

Ping service

Port service

You can add any number of these services to a managed platform with the "Import" button:

Import a Net Service on a managed platform

Note that the network connections will be made from the agent monitoring the platform you add the services to. So make sure this agent can connect to your HTTP or IP endpoints (is the remote network reachable? will you hit firewall rules?)

HTTP service

HTTP service monitors availability of an HTTP URL endpoint. By default the endpoint is reported up if a GET request to its URL gives any response. It can be configured to validate response code and response content (with a regular expression).

If you validate the response content, bear in mind that it will be entirely loaded in memory. So for efficiency and reliability don't use this option with large sized responses.

The HTTP service defines a "contentLength" metric. This metric is filled with the HTTP response content length header. When the response does not contain this header, the metric will have a default value of -1. You may want to disable this particular metric in this case.

Ping service

Ping service lets you know if a remote IP is reachable. The internal mechanism involved may vary upon JVM implementation but will typically be an ICMP echo request or a TCP request to port 7 (echo service).

Port service

Port service monitors availability of a remote port for TCP connection. This can be useful to check if a remote service you cannot manage with an RHQ agent is listening to your connections.

Want more?

Would you like to see other type of services in this plugin? Come and tell us in the forum.